So I came into work the other morning and found my good ole trusty License Server that housed Raster Design had given up the ghost! It has been my faithful companion for 5+ years. So, after installing a new box, I came to a realization that this isn’t going to be a fun transition. I renamed the new server to keep in with our new server naming scheme.
Getting the software reinstalled was fine but I had all those workstations out there that were pointing to a server that is now dead. Would I have to individually uninstall/reinstall? Wow, I hope not!
So after a little digging around I found the answer!
The licpath.lic file resides in a buried path so deep that it hasn’t seen the light of day since it left Cupertino.
So, if you are on an XP box, the file resides here:
Documents & Settings/All Users/Application Data/Autodesk/ARD2009*/R17.2*/Adlm/LICPATH.LIC
On Vista boxes, it is here:
ProgramData/Autodesk/ARD2009*/R17.2*/Adlm/LICPATH.LIC
* The asterisk indicates that yours may vary depending on what you are after and what version it is. Also make sure that you have the proper permissions and that all files are viewable.
The Licpath.lic is an editable file and only contains 2 lines (well mine did):
SERVER *YOURSERVERNAME* 000000000000
USE_SERVER
The key is *YOURSERVERNAME*. Rename that to the new server and the user is back up and running again!
Now on to other matters at hand.
There are also two Windows registry location you can change the license server info which I’ve listed below. I currently have a custom .vbs script run during login that updates these for everyone on our network via Windows Group Policy.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\FLEXlm License Manager\ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment\ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE
The reason we’ve gone to this extent is that we run 13 separate license servers from various offices which host the wide array of Autodesk product licenses we have. With this script it defines multiple license servers as part of our distributed license server model to allow each workstation to have the ability to pull a license from any of the specified servers in the order defined. Just in case their local license server runs out of licenses for a particular product it will move on to the additional servers defined to find an available license. This license server model protects us from WAN circuit outages that would normally render the software unusable if they didn’t have a local license server running but at the same time give everyone access to all products and licenses company-wide when WAN circuits are up.
One concern is with having too many servers defined, the amount of time it takes the software to move on and obtain a license before the software times out by default may not be enough. There is an additional system variable that can be added to increase this timeout setting which could also be added and modified via a script.
Thanks for the information. I knew there was a registry setting somewhere, but I didn’t look deep enough. Appreciate the added insight.
That is exactly what we do as well and as an added measure, the vbs will also add the FLEXLM_TIMEOUT variable and set it to 3000000. I have 11 offices using this method and last month we had a license server go out in one of the remote offices and it took a week to get it a new server, but no one know because they were pulling licenses from the other office.
One thing to keep in mind with the FLEXLM_TIMEOUT variable is it does have an impact on some other applications, we have found the lower we set the value the better performance we get opening our ESRI applications in our Remote offices. We previously had the value set high (the value is in Microseconds so it is all relative) we dropped the number by a factor of 10 and saw an improvement in some offices of over a minute in savings when opening ESRI apps. Higher FLEXLM_TIMEOUT values will help offices with sketchy WAN or VPN connections but keeping the value low hass some performance benfits as well.